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BCSWomen Chair Sarah Burnett has had a fab idea, which is to hold a series of webinars that talk about AI and how it is changing the world. In BCSWomen we do a lot of stuff about the women, and a lot of stuff to support women, but we also do a lot of stuff that is useful for tech people in general. The AI Accelerator falls into this category; the idea is that tech is changing and AI is driving that change, so we’re going to try and provide a background and overview of AI to help people get to grips with this. OnceRead More →

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The 10th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held on April 12th, at Aberystwyth University. Around 200 attendees enjoyed a day of inspiring talks, fascinating student posters, careers advice, employers fair, lots of networking and too much cake. Our headline sponsor this year was Google, who covered loads of the student travel and also sent a speaker along. As we pay for travel for all the poster contest finalists and as we were in Aberystwyth this year, we paid for 2 nights for everyone. This enabled us to have a social the night before, with Scott Logic providing a hackathon activity which got people talking and codingRead More →

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On Wednesday I hosted my first ever British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) one-day workshop. The BMVA are the organisation which drives forwards computer vision in the UK, and they run a series of one-day technical meetings, usually in London, which are often very informative. In order to run one, you have to first propose it, and then the organisation work with you to pull together dates, program, bookings and so on. If you work in computer vision and haven’t been to one yet, you’re missing out. I won’t write an overview of the whole day – that’s already been done very well by Geraint fromRead More →

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On Sunday we had our first Aberystwyth Robotics Club pumpkin hack. Kids, pumpkins, flashing lights and electronics together in a fun afternoon workshop. In the carving station, the kids hacked away at their pumpkins with kid-safe tools or gave their design to one of our high powered Dremel wielding helpers. With a suggested age range of 6-12 we weren’t going to let the attendees loose with super sharp knives or powertools, but they managed to design their pumpkins themselves and help to cut them out (or at least, carve them) In the coding zone, we had a bunch of laptops, a bunch of Arduino nanoRead More →

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We’ve had our first journal paper published from my EPSRC first grant. It gives a comprehensive review of work into the automated image analysis of plants – well, one particular type of plant, Arabidopsis Thaliana. It’s by Jonathan Bell and myself, and it represents a lot of reading, talking and thinking about computer vision and plants. We also make some suggestions which we hope can help inform future work in this area. You can read the full paper here, if you’re interested in computer vision and plant science. The first grant as a whole is looking at time-lapse photography of plants and aims to buildRead More →

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Last week I was invited to present at the first Human Centred Cognition summer school, near Bremen in Germany. Summer schools are a key part of the postgraduate training experience, and involve gathering together experts to deliver graduate level training (lectures, tutorials and workshops) on a particular theme. I’ve been to summer schools before as a participant, but never as faculty. We’re at a crossroads in AI at the moment: there’s been a conflict between “good old fashioned AI” (based upon logic and the symbol manipulation paradigm) and non-symbolic or sub-symbolic AI (neural networks, probabilistic models, emergent systems) for as long as I have known,Read More →

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Last week (on Friday) we held the Aberystwyth Image Analysis workshop. I think it was the 3rd, or maybe the 4th one of these I’ve organised. The aim is to have some informal talks and posters centred around the theme of image analysis (including image processing, computer vision, and other image-related stuff) from across Aberystwyth. To encourage participation from people whether they’ve got results or not we have 10 minute slots for problem statements, short talks, work in progress and so on, and we have 20 minute slots for longer pieces of work. This year there were 4 departments represented in talks: Computer science, Maths,Read More →

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On Wednesday, Aber Robotics Club put on a day of coding, gaming and robotics in Old College. We ran two workshops: one on Minecraft, and one on Mindstorms (lego robots). Each had about 30 kids in, and the aim was to have a techy day that taught attendees something new, but that was also fun: it was a summer holiday workshop after all. In the Mindstorms lego robots workshop we did a mixture of activities – most of which I’ve blogged about before. We did the “program a humanoid robot” exercise, where we get kids to write down programs for their parents (who end upRead More →

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Last weekend was Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s main Hacker/maker camp. It’s an outstanding opportunity for meeting up with tinkerers, coders and makers from across the UK and beyond. I was at the first EMF (in 2012, blog post here) talking about women in tech, and went back to this one to talk about schools outreach and the work we’re doing with kids and families. I spoke about schools and kids engagement in general, but also more specifically about our EU playfulcoding project. You can see my talk here: And you can view the slides here, if you just want slides, not talk. The talk wasRead More →

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Early last Sunday I left sunny mid-Wales for the last ever meeting in our EU Erasmus+ project “Early Mastery/Playful Coding”. We flew from Bristol to Girona with Ryanair (who call Girona “Barcelona”, which gives some clue to its location). The cloud cover cleared as soon as we crossed the channel, and the view from the airplane was rather lovely. The Pyrenees in particular were stunning. Once in Girona we met up with the Ysgol Bro Hyddgen crew, teachers from the school up the road in Machynlleth. A chatty evening spent in a lovely riverside bar rounded off the day of travel nicely. Monday morning, brightRead More →